The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (39 page)

The chaplain’s log, which Jack had held on to all these years, listed all the evenings when Gus had been called to the hospital for an emergency. “There’s no way Gus could have had an affair—especially that summer, when it supposedly started,” he’d said whenever the subject came up. “The assistant chaplain had heart surgery in June and Gus was on call almost all the time for emergencies. As someone who had their sleep disrupted almost every night,
I
remember.”

But it’s something else that finally convinces me. Something only I know. Something that, for me, obliterates all doubts. It’s the way Neil looked at me when he visited Hallie last summer. There was something about his expression that felt queasily familiar. Not because I’d met Neil before, but because I’d seen that expression on other faces. It was the same wary, surreptitious glance I got from the Bug’s sporadic girlfriends. The twisted-up smile of someone sizing up an adversary. The barely concealed glare of someone who knew I had a claim on a heart they wanted to own.

“God, Mila, what’s wrong with you?” the Bug mutters, looking more confused—and
older
—in his ratty bathrobe. I almost wish I had time to explain, even to stay for breakfast like he wanted me to do. But I have to get home and talk to Hallie.
Now!
I’m so delirious and scared that I actually kiss my dad on the cheek, which freaks us both out. Then, before he can stop me, I grab his precious relic, stuff it in my pocket, and dash out the door with the frenzied Stella leaping at my heels.

When I look back, I see the Bug standing in shadows behind the glass door, his hand clapped onto the cheek where I kissed him. As if it were a wound.

But I’ve already left him behind. I’m on that highway, racing toward Provincetown. I’m bursting into the house with the purple door that’s already filling up with the inevitable visitors who usually wander in on Saturday. And even though I know it would be better to wait till the guests leave to tell Hallie, I’m pulling her outside onto the back deck. And there, with her beautiful bay shining in the background, I’m shaking and crying as I tell her the truth that just might free Gus Silva.

Chapter 44

A
s exasperating as he can be
at times, there are three things I love about Lunes Oliveira:

1.  He knows how hot he is, but somehow it hasn’t ruined him.

2.  No matter when you call him, he’ll tell you how crazy busy he is. What, did you expect him to just drop everything and be there? Then he will.

3.  He’s got a laugh that can make the house shake, and I doubt he’s ever had a day so bleak that he hasn’t used it at least once.

He was in Truro with his boys when Hallie called and told him we had something.
Something important
, she’d added, trying to keep the elation out of her voice and failing. Immediately, he launched into his spiel: this was his home she’d reached, not his office, in case she didn’t know, so if she wasn’t calling to ask for a date  . . .

Then, abruptly, he stopped. “Something important? Really?”

Though he ended by telling her to come by the office on Monday, Hallie starts grinding his favorite coffee beans as soon as they hung up. By the time the coffee had brewed, Lunes walked through the door, in a pair of jeans and a cream-colored parka that emphasized the rich color of his skin.

“Coffee? You’ve got to be kidding, right? You think I gave up time with my kids to sit around and drink coffee?” But even as he’s objecting, he’s pulling a mug from the cupboard and pouring himself a cup. “All I can say is this better be good.”

He kisses me on the cheek like a favorite niece. “If you could give us a little time, sweetie, your stepmom and I have some business here.”

Like I said, I have a minor crush on Lunes, and I love it when he calls Hallie my stepmom, as if a court or somebody official said that we belonged to each other legally and forever. But there’s no way I am going to disappear. Hallie and I speak at once—reminding him that their so-called
business
concerned my mother. My past. My life.

Lunes puts up his hands in surrender. “This is starting to remind me of my mom’s kitchen. Can’t walk in the door without three women talkin’ at me all at the same time. If it’s not my mother and my sisters, it’s a couple of aunts and my bossy cousin Nicole.”

“This could be it, Lunes,” Hallie says.

“It?”
Lunes raises his eyebrows, as if he didn’t know what she meant.

I see her fingering something in her pocket, and I know what it is. The Visa bill. The evidence. Our flimsy piece of hope.

“Okay, you’ve got my attention.” Lunes sits across from her at the table in what used to be Nick’s seat.

I’m between them as Hallie starts to speak. For the next ten minutes, Lunes’s eyes flicker from her to me as we tell the story together, her picking up a thread, and then passing it to me until we’ve sewn up the taut, implausible theory that we’re convinced will free Gus. By the time we’re finished Hallie’s sprawling house is too small for Lunes. He is up and pacing from room to room. And every now and then we hear him emit a loud “God
damn
!” or a quieter “But what about . . .”

A few minutes later, he leans against the doorway. “You know what’s really insane? I almost bought your story—and probably for the same reason you knuckleheads believed it.
Because I want to.
But there’s one little detail that keeps getting in the way.”

Hallie and I wait for him to continue.

“Ava Cilento is dead.” He looks in my direction as if he just gave me the bad news. “I don’t know who came and met you at the Oyster, Mila, but it wasn’t your mother. Maybe the Ptown police and some reporter from the
Cape Cod Times
bought your story, but they weren’t in the courtroom. They didn’t see the crime-scene photos. An estimated four quarts of blood were spilled in that motel.
Her DNA.
I’m sorry, Mila, but no one walks away from something like that.”

“Not unless someone with a rudimentary knowledge of phlebotomy and a proper place to store the blood had been systematically drawing her blood weeks in advance,” Hallie says. “It just so happens Neil’s brother Liam was working the night shift in the ER—”

“Whoa.
Whoa
,” Lunes interrupts. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound? In fact, I’m glad you told this little story of yours to
me.
Anyone else would have the two of you in straitjackets by now.” But in spite of his words, a match is struck behind his eyes, and in a minute he’s pacing again.

“Liam Gallagher is a doctor. Why would he risk—” he begins.

“He believed he was saving a woman’s life, Lunes,” Hallie answers. “And maybe his brother’s life, too. Obviously, everything was falling apart for Neil in New York. He was almost as desperate for a new start as Ava was.”

“But Ava was in California, right? I mean she had to be. She couldn’t have been flying across the country to pick up her mail. And you talked to Neil in Chicago on a regular basis, right? You had an address for him?”

Lunes sinks into a chair, rubs his eyes, and answers his own question before Hallie has a chance to speak. “Don’t tell me. All you had was a post-office box, and every time you talked to him, it was on a cell phone. The man could have been anywhere.”

Then he gets up and stands in front of me. “Are you sure it was your mother?”

“Absolutely one hundred percent.”

“
Of course she’s sure
,” Hallie says, stepping between us as if she can protect me from the pain of that truth, or from what all this means for Ava. “A person doesn’t forget her own mother, Lunes!”

“It’s insane,” Lunes says when he resumes his pacing. “Completely insane. In fact—”

He leaves those two words dangling and an index finger in the air, as we take a huge simultaneous inhale. I’m so scared he’s going to say that
in fact
, he’s not buying it, and that if he leaves now, he’s still got time to get to the rink before the open skate is over. I don’t even dare to exhale.

But then he finishes his sentence. “In fact, it’s so insane there’s no way you could make it up. Damn, Hallie, let me see that bill again.”

Chapter 45

I
t’s only two days later when
Lunes’s secretary calls and asks Hallie and me to come to his office.
Immediately.
The first irrational thing I do is look at the clock. It’s after five. Isn’t Lunes’s office supposed to be closed? And of course, I know.

“Oh my God, did they—” Hallie looks like she’s about to do one of those swoon things you read about in Victorian novels so I grab the phone from her hand, and finish the question.

“Did they . . . find them?” After Hallie’s exuberance, my voice is a scared, cheepy little bird.

“Lunes will explain everything when you get here,” Sue says, but her voice is screaming:
Yes! Now get over here already, will you?
Then she hangs up.

T
he reception area in Lunes’s office
is in darkness, and we’re almost surprised when the door opens. Then we see the narrow rim of light coming from Lunes’s closed door.

“Hallie? Mila? That you?” he asks in a voice that’s pure silk. “Come on in.”

When we go in, he’s behind his desk as if he’s working, except that he’s pulled off his tie and is drinking from a snifter. A matching glass filled with golden-brown liquid is set in front of the chair that’s clearly meant for Hallie, and there’s a glass of ice and a soda for me.

Hallie hardly seems to notice. “Come on, Lunes. Tell me! Is it really—” she says. Or screams. Or maybe I just hear it that way.

Before she gets the words out, a slow smile consumes him. It starts in his eyes before it lifts his cheeks and exposes his teeth. Finally it pulls him to his feet and opens his arms. “Yes, it’s really truly over. All but the annoying details.”

Then he abandons all pretense of professional detachment as he comes out from behind the desk and hugs Hallie so hard he lifts her off her feet. “We got ’em, Hallie. The PI I hired found out Neil’s never worked in Chicago. Never lived anywhere near the place, though he apparently stopped there long enough to pick up a cell phone with a local area code.

“So he’s been—” Hallie says, and then shakes her head, unable to finish the sentence.

“That’s right. With the information Mila provided, we were able to track him to a little town less than a hundred miles from the post office where Ava posted her birthday card. Even acting occasionally in small productions, and teaching classes.”

It’s only a second before Hallie tugs me into their circle and strokes my cheek as if she understands that for me, happiness will come later. Right now I feel like I just stepped on a grenade.

“You need to sit, Mila—right here beside your stepmom,” Lunes pulls out my seat. Then he pours my soda and pushes the snifter in Hallie’s direction.

Hallie waves it away as she collapses into her chair. “Thanks, but I never drink that stuff,” she says. Then, before he can take it away, she abruptly seizes the glass and for a minute, she peers into the dark gold liquid as if she’s mesmerized by it.

“What is that—Jack Daniels?”

“Something like that,” Lunes laughs. “Why?”

But whatever she sees in the drink, Hallie isn’t about to share it with us. Instead, she throws it back like she does that kind of thing all the time.

“That was almost as sweet as the last time I had it,” she says mysteriously. Then she turns to me, and adds, “I hope you know you’re driving home.”

“In that case, how about one more?” Lunes asks, producing a bottle of Irish whiskey.

“No, thanks, that was perfect. The last thing I want to do is dull this moment. I want to feel this, Lunes. I want to feel every bit of it. Have you called Alvaro and Jack yet?”

“Nope,” Lunes says. “I called the next of kin first.”

Hallie just smiles—and then she starts crying. “What about Gus? Does he even know?”

“I thought you might want to take care of that. I talked to the warden a little while ago and he’s going to permit Gus a call tonight around nine.”

Hallie closes her eyes, shutting out everything but the idea of the call she will make. Tonight. Nine p.m. Until now, until they were found, no one has wanted to break the news of Neil’s involvement, or to let Gus know how close his release might be. It still felt too fragile to all of us. But now she will have to find a way to explain that it wasn’t only a desperate woman who conspired to send him to prison and keep him there. His childhood friend was part of it, too, probably even the mastermind.

When she opens her eyes, she takes my hand, as if she felt the wobbling inside me. “You okay?”

I want to say that I’m doing great. That this is the best day of my life. But instead, I hear myself saying, “What do you think they’ll do to her?”

“Whatever it is, it won’t be enough,” Hallie says. Then she puts her arm around me. “I know she’s your mother, Mila, but it’s hard—maybe even impossible—for me not to hate her.”

“It’s hard for me, too. But it’s also hard for me not to love her.”

“Of course it is. You wouldn’t be Mila if it wasn’t.”

And then, I ask Lunes if he’d mind if I used his bathroom.

Hallie’s chair scrapes against the wood floor as she rises to follow me, but Lunes stops her. “Let her have her time, Hallie.”

When I flick on the fluorescent lights, I come face-to-face with what feels like the biggest mirror in the world. I’ve always hated my reflection. It reminds me of the face I saw at the bus stop when I was a little girl. The face of a mother who hasn’t seen her child in two years. The hungry face. I also see the girl in the photograph Gus carried with him for all those years. The child who’d seen too much. The pathetic daughter Ava abandoned and betrayed, not once but with every breath she has taken for the last ten years. It’s an image that makes me want to run away.

But someone else is there, too. It’s the girl my surrogate mom showed me I could be. The girl who was stronger than anyone ever knew—even without her warrior jewelry. It’s the girl Ethan loves, the girl I dream into existence every night I fall asleep in Thorne House: Hallie’s daughter.

I come out of the bathroom, stand in the hallway, and listen to Lunes. “What I don’t understand is why Neil felt compelled to stay in touch with you. It’s almost as if he wanted to get caught.”

Hallie is quiet for a minute. “No, that’s not it,” she says with a certainty that floors me. “He called and visited and wrote because he had some kind of perverse need to control Gus and me. He couldn’t let it go. And also because he believed he was so smart, so completely in charge, that we would never figure him out.”

Lunes sips his drink. “Maniacal arrogance. It’s a common trait in cold-blooded killers—not that our friend Neil actually murdered anyone.”

“What he did was worse than murder,” I say, surprising them with my presence as much as my words. “He sentenced his enemy to a slow death, and then he sat back and watched.”

“
His enemy.
How could anyone in the world see Gus—” Hallie leaves her question unfinished—maybe because she’s afraid to contemplate the answer.

T
hat night, just before nine, she
places the portable phone on the table between us. “I’ve been thinking about it for three hours, but I still have no idea how I’m going to tell him about Neil.”

Unconsciously, my eyes drift to the photograph on the wall in the kitchen that she hasn’t yet taken down. The picture of Hallie, Neil, and Gus on the beach.

“Just say it. However it comes out, it will be okay. Gus will be okay.” I think of how black his eyes had been when he told me about Xavier. Obviously, the dark potential of the human soul was not news to him. If he needed a reminder, he only had to look down at his own forearm where it was carved in the form of a ragged heart. It’s one secret that even Hallie will never know.

At 8:55, when I get up to go upstairs, she seems surprised—maybe even a little alarmed. “No, Mila. I want you to be here when I tell him. You were the one who made this happen. Without you, we never would have found them.”

But much as I’d like to take credit, I shake my head. “Maybe I helped, but you were always the driving force. And this right now? This is between you and Gus.”

Then I go up to my room and bolt the door, as if it’s possible to lock out twenty years of Hallie’s pent-up emotion.